In the name of science!

Wow, the past month has certainly flown by! I wanted to share my life in the bio lab along with some of my scientific Boston adventures with you.

This is what I do every day-including the weekends!

Okay, I was slightly kidding. The above photos are from a weekend trip to Boston, at the Let's Talk About Food Festival.My friend Kat (Wellesley '14, left) and I were food scientists-complete with pipettes and goggles- at an event sponsored by the Boston Museum of Science. I really wish I owned a pair of green safety glasses!

In reality, I don't go into the lab during weekends [yet], and I tend to look more like this:

took this photo when looking to see what some of us are doing in the summer.Lab safety is super important, especially when working in sterile conditions daily in the tissue culture hood.Janaki ('14) and I wear gloves and lab coats, plus close-toed shoes.We have been repeating experiments, and have finally gotten some awesome results! From reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to cell stimulation and more, we're now designing our own experiments, and sharing our excitement in our weekly lab meetings with the other professors and students doing biology-related research.

This is the initial set up of an agarose gel, with which Janaki and I were testing how our RT-PCR results looked. We ran current through the gel, causing different weighted bands of DNA to drop off as time progressed. These specific results weren't too exciting, but still helped us learn more about these samples.

Another important part of summer [besides the cool kids in the bio lab] is the celebration of summer birthdays!A few weeks ago, we celebrated Professor Joanne Pratt's birthday with our [adorably] nerdy cake [thanks to Liz ('13) for the picture]. Janaki and I decorated it with one of the first things we examined under a microscope this summer-fluorescent cells.See if you can make out what our "glowing cells" spell.

I'm looking forward to what we will discover in the lab, and what conclusions we may come to, with a little under a month left until I'm headed back to super sunny south Florida!